Growing Some Food in San Diego--Jumping Right into this Blogging Thing!

San Diego is an amazing place. We live on the West side of the San Diego Bay in the Point Loma neighborhood of La Playa and we get about 300 sunny days a year.  It really is paradise.  One of the best things is you can grow food and flowers pretty much year round.  Vegetables take much longer to mature in the winter and spring months, but getting fresh tomatoes in February is a real treat! 

Today I did some work in my front gardens.  I was thrilled to find our first sugar snap peas of the season...a whole 11 of them!   OK, so we ate a few.  They are so sweet and crunchy! 

This also made me realize that it was time to get to work on our main Spring-Summer garden.  We live on a hill, so due to water run off patterns, seedlings do much better than straight seeds.

So to get started on our big garden, I started some seeds that will be transferred into the main vegetable garden sometime next month.  In years past, the birds determined that we had the avian version of "Hometown Buffet" in our yard and I began to wonder why my starts weren't, well....starting.  After I figured out the birds were partially to blame, I came up with this cover to give my seeds a fighting chance.  The white containers are all tomatoes, the yellow are onions an pickling cukes.  The round guys have melons, squash, tomatillo, slicing cukes.

The white containers on the left are tomato seedlings I transplanted from the clamshell mini-greenhouses.  The remaining clamshell mini-greenhouses contain pepper starts and herb (basil, cilantro, thyme) starts.

I am a great fan of reusing and repurposing items, so the clamshells from my Trader Joe's blueberries make the perfect mini-greenhouses.  The tricky thing is to keep them moist enough to germinate and remember to transplant when the seedlings begin to brush the top of the clamshell.  The tomatoes are recent graduates!

This is the edge of one of our vegetable beds.  I love the flax and sweet pea flowers...they are so bright and cheery.  If you look closely, you can see some potato plants in there.  Potatoes and carrots are things we grow pretty much year round.  Generally, I tend to grow potatoes in containers because they're much easier to find.  I don't bother with seed potatoes.  If one of my spuds or a grocery store spud decides to grow eyes, I just cut them off and plant them in a pot.  They have such nice big leaves and when they die off....you have potatoes!


So my first blog post is done.  I hope you've enjoyed reading about my random adventures in San Diego!
Cheers~
Marti